Tempted

I said to my reflection, “Let’s get out of this place.” —Squeeze

What does it mean to be tempted?

Many of us think of a moral narrative we learned from our house of worship or from our religious education during childhood. While it may differ for each of us, generally that narrative tells us two things. First, that temptation is about feeling a pull to do something wrong. Something we know we should not do. Second, that temptation has an otherness to it. It comes from somewhere—or someone—separate from ourselves. And that separate someone is a bully. Its voice is a simpering evil voice trying to pry us away from our better angels. It nags at us as we slowly weaken. It is implacable. We wish that it would stop.

But is there a way to think about temptation that doesn’t moralize? And that doesn’t cast us as its victim?

Why not try thinking about… a restaurant menu?

A menu gives us the set of the choices that are available to us at a moment in time. Economists Frank Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer have defined temptation essentially as a choice whose presence on the menu imposes a sort of cost on us if we don’t choose it.1 A mental “tax.” We don’t have to choose that thing. But the very fact that it’s there and we have to pass over it means we’re going to pay that tax. If we don’t pass it over but instead give in to it, taking the path of least resistance, then we don’t have to pay the tax.

This setup captures everything that is intuitively relevant about temptation. Consider a restaurant with a menu that has both fish and steak on it. If you’re health-conscious, perhaps you come to this restaurant intending to eat fish so as to stay on your diet. That said, you really do enjoy a good steak. So when the restaurant presents you with the menu, you face a conundrum. You can give in to temptation and order the steak. Or you can “be good”… but that’s hard, even painful! Because you don’t want to give up the steak! The excruciating difficulty of resisting the steak is what the mental tax captures.

And the interesting thing is this: if you are dead set on sticking with your diet, then (given the tax) you’d prefer that the restaurant present you with a menu with only fish on it. A menu without steak presents you with nothing that you have to painfully resist. In fact, it would be great to have someone edit the restaurant’s menu so as to make your life less difficult. Imagine, if you like, hiring a valet who enters the restaurant ahead of you and says to the maître d’, “When Monsieur arrives, it is requested that you tell him that you are out of the steak, and all he can have is the fish!” This sort of contortion is what we economists call a commitment device. It’s similar to the way a smoker who is trying to quit doesn’t keep cigarettes around the house, or how a spendthrift leaves their wallet at home when they go to the mall. The cigarettes and wallet create options for us that we don’t want. So we remove the options.

Notice how all of this drains the moralizing out of what temptation is. What distinguishes temptation is just that, if it’s around, it’s a pain in the neck for us to try to avoid it. Or, seen another way, it’s something that gets in our way as we’re trying to get to some place we’d planned to go.

To me at least, that sounds more annoying than evil.

Maybe you’re skeptical. Maybe you don’t believe the economists trying to tell you that temptation is about menus. Maybe you still believe the religious school idea that it’s about a little voice in your ear telling you to do something.

Then listen to this little voice in your ear—mine—as I tell you that those two ideas about what temptation is are actually the same thing.

Economists Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine2 show that the Gul and Pesendorfer model in which temptations impose a cost when not chosen is mathematically equivalent to a framework in which there are in effect two separate decision-makers within the individual: one who wants something and another who does not want that same thing. In other words, you are susceptible to temptation because, as the Cherokee saying goes, “There are two wolves in you.”

But if there are two wolves, then which wolf is right? Or, more to the point, which wolf is the real you? The voice trying to tempt you into a course of action may appear, from one perspective, to be the voice of an “other”—an external force that is leading you astray. But what if instead it is the voice of your true self?

I have my own temptation story.

From 2006 to 2011, I engaged in a practice called calorie restriction. Research had shown that worms and mice put on a diet that severely limited their daily calorie intake lived significantly longer. Like, a lot longer: the equivalent of 120 human years. And they were healthy and strong over that extended lifespan.

No one had tested the effect of calorie restriction on human lifespans: humans live long enough that the amount of time needed to do an appropriately controlled scientific study would be decades. But that didn’t stop people from writing diet books about calorie restriction—or me from reading them and deciding to play the guinea pig myself.

It started out well. During my first 9 months on the diet, I lost 15 pounds. Also, my glucose and triglyceride levels improved substantially. All the metrics of improved health that the calorie restriction books told me to expect were looking good for me.

But there was a catch: I had to stay at it. The calorie restriction lifestyle was a lifetime commitment. Not just “lose 15 pounds and you’re done.” And it was hard. I was always thinking of food, always looking forward to the next time I could eat. And, because the food choices had to be ultra-nutritious and not-at-all calorie dense, even the eating wasn’t very satisfying.

I was going to live longer (maybe). But was it worth it?

In their economic theory of willpower and personal rules, Roland Bénabou and Jean Tirole3 discuss extreme cases of willpower—situations in which people commit themselves rigidly to regimens so austere that they are actually made worse off by their own success. This sounded suspiciously like me. But it is the philosopher and religious scholar James Carse who more vividly nailed what I was up to, describing “those who observe special diets or patterns of life designed to prolong youth and postpone aging and death indefinitely… they hate their life in this world now in order that they may have it later.”4

When I finally gave up calorie restriction, you might say that I gave in to temptation. That I was weak. But it had been such a narrow existence. And life offers us so much right now. Ultimately I decided that perhaps all those unhealthy things were on the menu for a reason. That perhaps the other voice in my head knew best.

Maybe we can all benefit from asking ourselves, What are our “treadmills”? What things are we doing that we have stuck with out of fear or stubbornness or even just habit? Things that are getting us nowhere and spending all of our time and effort in the process? Sometimes, the self that is tempting us is dragging us down, taking us somewhere we are better off not going. But not always. Sometimes that other place isn’t down. Just elsewhere. Somewhere that we both needed to go.